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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of "modern" CP/M and to see how far an old and minimalistic OS like that can be pushed on current tech.

I built a 16-core Z80 laptop running CP/NOS (the networked version of CP/M 2.2) - it's surprisingly great and useable: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/

It's like a windowed, multi-tasking environment where each process actually gets its own dedicated CPU/memory/display hardware and can run fully independent of the others.

I think it was Cromenco that had a setup where you had a 'master' S-100 CP/M CPU board that managed mass storage, printers and other things, and 'subordinate' S-100 cards that had CPU, memory and SIO. Each user would be dedicated a sub card and terminal, running their own full version of CP/M, and the master mediated access to shared resources. Very popular in small office settings for a while.

That really sounds like a 8-bit mainframe with added steps.

I'd say more like a VM system where there's a (mostly) 1-to-1 mapping between hardware and user, supported by a really simpleminded hypervisor. But I definitely see where you're thinking.

> I built a 16-core Z80 laptop running CP/NOS (the networked version of CP/M 2.2)

I remember that laptop! I wonder if it can be emulated in MAME easily.

That, and beefier nodes running something like MP/M (or different architectures, such as CP/M 68K, alongside the more usual CP/M 80) would also be fun.

Maybe it’s time for a CP/M ARM.

Is CP/NET reliable on your cluster? Way back in the day, when I worked at an outfit named ACE on the then-dominant solution for multiprocessor CP/M dpc/os, we evaluated CP/NET and found it unsuitable as a daily driver due to a lot of crashing.

Neat - I had never heard of ACE. In my (fairly limited) experience it works fine, although running the cores at 140 MHz (and the network) forgives a lot of sins. I actually wrote my CP/NET server as a regular CP/M application in Turbo Pascal, so I can't speak to other server solutions. The idea behind my ZedRipper was to basically turn a 'multi-user' CP/M system into a single-user/multi-tasking system, and it worked better than expected.

Chris: I would really love it if you would publish the source for your cp/net server in turbo pascal? That would seriously make my day...

Holy hell, that's amazing!!

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